Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

Those who would know the world, seek first within your beings' depths; those who would truly know themselves, develop interest in the world.

A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection

Inward is not a direction. Inward is a dimension.

I wanted to go to a place where I could think, really sink into my own imagination, or ride it, or drift along it, as in a balloon. The kind of place that probably all writers crave. The kind of place where the outside world is still and quiet and you get a chance to listen, to peer, to go inward

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

There is no question that the language of "felt thought" must be quarried from our personal depths. Like the best gold, it does not lie on the surface.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

The big show is inside my head.

I don’t know how you look at the inside of your head — what metaphor you choose — but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.